


Bruise Blue Ink

by Quinara



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, Community: sb_fag_ends, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-26
Updated: 2011-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:37:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinara/pseuds/Quinara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She comes out in pretty words too often.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bruise Blue Ink

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to the 'Fiction Romance' and 'Obsessed with You' prompts at the sb_fag_ends LJ community.

There’s a poet in him somewhere, because the fucking git won’t die, so sometimes – when she’s really got in his skull, sashayed into every corner of his mind the way a wank can’t purge away – he has to write her down. She comes out in pretty words too often, sunshine and lavender and darling beloved dancer, but when he really gets her, when he can see that scowling face in such fine detail she’s almost _there_? She’s anything but pretty words then.

The words come best when she leaves him, when he’s drunk enough the night before that his thoughts still run on loose, when the scratches and the bruises haven’t healed and the drying blood fuses the sheet to his skin. He writes about how drinking from her cunt scours his throat like absinthe, how he’d snap her neck if he thought he’d see it in her eyes, how, above all else, he hates her. Looking at nothing but the page, eyes burning from her musk, his pen bleeds poison and his fingers smudge the paper; when it's over he hurls the book so hard the spine rips on the rough stone wall.

One morning, she’s standing there to pick it up.

“What is this?” she demands, her voice like steel (and he’s already losing the power to capture her). “What the _fuck_ is this?” Forgot her bra or left him too much dignity, who knows, but now she’s back and the notebook’s shaking in her hand, pages scraping over themselves as he and the words split glares. “You write this shit about _me_?”

She sounds just like Cecily, a hundred years too late.

“Who the fuck else is there to write about?” he asks, begs, cries (not now, not yet). Tearing the sheet away from the wounds, which smarts as much as ever, he storms across the crypt and tells her, “You’re all I have in me. It’s you and booze and blood and smoke, some fucking alchemy to tie it all together.”

Callous as always, she snorts and reads on, the words winning out over him. Slowly the pre-dawn silence swells to fill the space, soft like nothing has a right to be, and all he’s doing is watching her read every syllable she’d slap him for saying out loud. _Please, if they’re no good…_ The phrase is still familiar, but he won’t utter it this time. He didn’t write these for her.

She gets bored or maybe to the end eventually, raising her head to meet his eyes. “Why do you throw it away when you're done?” she asks nonsensically, thumbs nursing the scrapes across the hardbound cover, eyes hollowed fathoms deep.

The answer comes like the sun breaking skin; he almost laughs. “Same reason you chuck me, I reckon.” You can’t keep it with you, that much feeling, can’t see the marks and let them read.

Fingers tightening on the notebook one last time, she looks at his face, won’t look at his body, then lets the poems fall back into the dust. After that she leaves, the door swing quick but gentle in her wake.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [so now begins the waiting.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/460678) by [Quinara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinara/pseuds/Quinara)




End file.
